Alien invasion is a concept for which we still lack definitive proof, even if some scientific thinking now asserts that life on Earth might well have its ancestry in extraterrestrial space bacteria that arrived on a comet a few billennia ago. In any case, if aliens were to take over the world and want a place to put on their music, they would, I'm almost certain, choose Anish Kapoor's rubberised aubergine/doughnut/ectoplasmic effusion/very rude kidney bean – the world's first blow-up concert hall, no less – the Ark Nova.

The brainchild of Michael Haefliger, artistic director of the Lucerne festival, the Ark Nova recently housed its inaugural performances in Matsushima, Japan. That's because Haefliger's original idea, as the New York Times reports, was to find a way to bring music to the region worst affected by the tsunami of 2011.

The solution is extraordinarily elegant: Kapoor's almost crudely sensual shape, with that curving void that runs the whole way through the shape – it reminds me of the scale of Kapoor's Marsyas for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, but with the Ark, you actually get to walk inside it, which you couldn't in that plastic-sheeted behemoth – becomes a 500-seater hall when it's fully inflated.

The benches in Japan were made from cedar trees felled by the tsunami. So too were the violins of the Classic for Japan project, one of the partners for the Lucerne festival's Ark Nova performances, turning the driftwood of the destruction into musical instrument. While the Ark's acoustics are not perfect in a Wigmore Hall sense, they're passable enough to give the place a unique atmosphere. You can imagine that's true: look at the images of the interior, as the sunlight suffuses the whole space in a roseate glow, as if the exterior were a single curving plane of stained glass rather than a sheet of aubergine-coloured plastic.

From air-conditioning that uses blocks of ice to doors imported from Germany to provide a perfect seal and make sure the whole thing doesn't slowly deflate, the Ark Nova pushes the boundaries of instant architecture. It's now packed in a truck, awaiting its next (currently unscheduled) inflation. It would be a thing of wonder in Hyde Park as a Serpentine Pavilion-style intervention. Or imagine it somewhere in the Lake District, where it would loom as a massive purple life-form, another sculptural shape to set alongside nature's equally remarkable and surreal geometries and geologies. And then you'd have the music as well …